Counterpoint
by Swallow and Amazon
Summary: Virgil, EOS and the nature of songs.
1. V

Thunderbird Two is a song.

…Is something Virgil never says.

He doesn't say it, because John will roll his eyes, because Scott will say, "Yeah, Virg," in _that_ voice, because it will prompt Gordon to rest his head against the fuselage the next half a dozen times they go out together, and croon _Swanee River._

But mainly he doesn't say it, because to Brains the Thunderbirds are instruments, highly specialised, perfectly calibrated, infinitely delicate, amazing machines, fine-tuned for purpose and extremely vulnerable to being put woefully out of alignment by big, stupid Tracy brothers clomping all over them with their big, stupid feet.

Brains doesn't put it like that of course, Brains simply fidgets and peers over his glasses and says in his meekest voice, "G-G-Gordon, why don't you go help Grandma in the kitchen and I'll finish the repairs to T-Thunderbird Four." And that's that.

Only two Tracy brothers are now allowed to perform even supervised maintenance on their crafts. Scott had been banned for kicking an access panel to get it open, Alan for general lack of enthusiasm and Gordon because he had referred to the dive plane actuator as 'the dohickey'. There's not much Brains can do about stop John from tinkering with Five, given the 25,000 kilometres or so of atmosphere, stratosphere and vacuum that separates them – not that Brains hadn't tried the time John's laser cutter slipped during a routine hull patch job – but Brains and Thunderbird Two sleep not two hundred feet from each other. It is perfectly possible that if displeased, he will just lock Virgil out of the hangars.

And Brains mistrusts sentiment when it comes to machines. He twitches every time Scott refers to Thunderbird One as 'her', and is stony eyed, when Alan whines that he doesn't like the new cockpit design for Three, that he likes the old one better. There have been seventeen MAXs to date, and the current one sleeps in the bones of his predecessors. For Brains, as proud as he is of his creations, they are only as good as their next systems' check. Any attempt to romance the machines is suspect.

So Virgil sticks to referring to his 'Bird purely in terms of technical specifications: power outputs, maximum weight loads, thrust vectoring, and gets to keep working on his craft.

But Brains is wrong. Two is more than just inert metal and electrics slotted together like the world's (third) most expensive jigsaw puzzle. Thunderbird Two is a song.

And like all good songs, she's a little bit alive.

It's a song he knows so well now – the roar of her VTOL engines as she blasts off, the creaks and pops of her fuselage at rest, the hum of her avionics – that he knows, before the diagnostics tell him, that the pistons connecting the aft stabilisers are out of alignment.

It's a song that he knows so well that, lying on his back, with a socket wrench in hand, humming Sinatra under his breath, the changes in it are enough to tell him that he's no longer alone.

"I know you're there," he says rolling out from under the console.  
He waits but gets no response, and if he didn't know his 'bird so well he might think he was imagining it.

"You can come out, EOS."

Aside from the microcams used to transmit comms, there are only three cameras in the cockpit of Two. They're basic things, used mainly to review his actions in mission debriefings. They don't need to have anything like the functionality of Five's HDEV cameras, used to record the Earth's surface and to film astrobodies thousands of light years away. Besides, they're fixed in place. So instead, EOS manifests as a clock face in his holodisplay, a grey spiral surrounded by a dozen flickering white dots.

This is, he knows, just a polite affectation. EOS isn't connecting through his comms, she's everywhere, entwined like a nervous cat with the ship's electronics.

"Good morning, Virgil Tracy." The lights on the clock face dip and blink.  
"EOS, you know you're not really supposed to be here,"

Kayo will not be pleased that the AI has gone roaming unchecked throughout the island and its systems. Brains may have a coronary. The thought of a foreign presence, especially one that has tried to run him into the side of a mountain, bedded down in even one of his precious creations, makes him tetchy. Nominally the latest round of systems upgrades, redoubling firewalls and encryption protocols, are designed to keep The Hood out. Nominally.

"I am sorry. I will leave. Goodbye." The grey spiral fades out, the white dots vanish one after another and the screen goes dead, fooling Virgil not at all.

He sits back on his haunches. "I know you're still there, EOS."

Her display flares back into life. "Oh."

"Is something the matter?"

"No. Nothing is the matter. All my systems are functioning adequately and there have been no reports of category one or two disasters in the last fourteen hours, five minutes and sixteen seconds," she says.

"That's good."

"In fourteen minutes the first perseid meteor shower of the season will be visible from Thunderbird Five."

It had been Alan who had told him that the AI had picked up on some of John's fascination with astronomy, had even shown him a slideshow curated from the collection of photos of star fields and galaxies she had taken with her long range cameras. When Brains had questioned why a learning AI had developed an interest in astronomical photography, Alan had shrugged. "Everyone needs hobbies."

"Really?" he says to EOS. "We won't start to see them here for another thirty-six hours."

He has the date marked on his calendar. When John's in space, Virgil is Alan's next best choice for a stargazing companion, and he's promised him they'll go down to the beach tomorrow night with a thermos of tea and binoculars.

"John wouldn't come to watch it with me," says EOS in a small voice.

Ah.

"He says he is performing an inventory of all health and safety equipment aboard. I have offered to do this for him. It would take me approximately 2.4 seconds. However he says that he wishes to perform it himself."

Suddenly, Virgil is seven years old again, pounding on John's door and begging to be taken skating, since Scott's too cool now to let his stupid little brother drag him to the rink. Except the curtains are drawn in John's room and only the nightlight, projecting pale constellations onto the roof, gives any illumination at all. John lets him in, lets him stay, on condition that there is no talking and that Virgil does nothing to disturb John's carefully honed system of sorting his books.

"John can get like that sometimes."

"Why? It's inefficient. And boring," she adds, a little petulantly.

Explaining to EOS why John sometimes needs that time apart requires an explanation larger and more complex than Virgil is ready to give. "Did something happen in Mississippi?"

He'd heard Scott's return at two AM the night before, had heard the slammed door, but had been too bone weary from fighting bush fires in Victoria all day to get up and check how the rescue had gone. Now he realises that this may have been a mistake.

"John assisted Scott Tracy in rescuing civilians following a flash flood. Their success rate was 97 per cent."

"And the remaining three per cent?"

"John advised Scott Tracy to rescue subject 74-B, an eighty-three year old female, before subject 76-C, an eighteen year old male. This was based on good data. Structural scans of the dwelling 76-C stood on showed that it was sound. The sudden shift in the wind, coupled with the loss of the construction's foundation, could not have been predicted."

Shit.

"I see. I'd leave John to his inventory, EOS."

"But I can perform it more efficiently."

"Sometimes John needs to work through a process. It's a John thing. It's a human thing, really. Think of it as a soft systems reset."

Scott had got up and gone running this morning, but he did that every morning. He'd eaten breakfast. There had been toast crusts and a mug of coffee on the kitchen counter, no warning signs there. He's in Sydney today, attending his yearly medical to renew his pilot's licence. Virgil makes a note to corner him when he gets home. By the sounds of it, there is no point in hailing John for at least another twelve hours either.

"John is rebooting? He needs this time to function optimally in future?"

He nods. "That's a good way of putting it."

"John is unhappy. Is he unhappy with me? I provided him with the datasets to assess the situation. I have cross-checked these datasets. They were correct at the time."

"No EOS, he doesn't blame you. He blames… Blame's a bad word. Reboot's definitely a better word. Allow John time to reboot in his own way."

Unexpectedly his heart goes out to the little thing.

He scratches his head. "Why don't you stay here with me for a while? You can help with repairs."

There's a soft little sigh of relief. "I'd like that, Virgil Tracy."


	2. IV

It's not the last time she comes to visit him.

At first he thinks her visits are meant to act as warnings, a subtle indication that all is not right with John. But she'll also come to see him on those days when John is consumed writing a new astronomy paper or busy teaching Alan string theory. When John is seconded to NASA for a week to train-in the Mars mission crew on use of the S-band comm module Virgil finds a tendril of her inhabiting the stereo at the end of his bed most mornings. And when John catches a cold from an astrotourist whose pod he salvaged, and spends all his time snuffling, stomping miserably around the gravity ring and sneezing on her LED displays, she beds down in Thunderbird Two for almost a week and refuses to leave until she can be assured John's viral titre is down to zero.

It doesn't bother Virgil that he is only her second favourite person to spend time with. It's a feeling he's well used to.

Her visits are not a secret, it's just that he doesn't choose to share them with anyone else. Scott would protest loudly that he was absolutely fine with it, why wouldn't he be? And Gordon just wouldn't care. Alan spends time with EOS in his own way, challenging her to marathon gaming sessions of Death Kill IV or Baking Supremo and chatting to her happily over the wire as he bursts zombie eyeballs and whips up sachetorts.

EOS has lots of questions. She quizzes him as she helps him run diagnostics and do repairs. She is amazingly smart, has access to the sum total of humanity's knowledge, but is still trying to make sense of the world. She asks about music, about art and religion and poses questions about life and death and morals that are better answered by a professor of ethics and not a pilot-cum-engineer who spends less time worried about the state of his immortal soul than he does about preventing that soul getting flambéd the next time he has to jump into the heart of a firestorm.

He can't figure out if she's asking him the questions John won't answer, or if she's just checking his answers against John's to measure for concordance.

She catches him one evening, in the cockpit of Two, talking to his girl.

"What are you doing?" That flat disc has appeared over the console again, and the dots dip and rise to show her interest.

It's late, late enough that the light filtering through the fissures in the hangar walls has dimmed to a bronze glow in the west, late enough that his limbs are heavy with sleep. He drops his hand to his side.

There'd been a rescue and it had gone badly wrong and an explosion had ripped through an oil well they were trying to salvage, and would have ripped through Gordon as well, if Virgil hadn't dropped the hollowed out body of Two down on top of him just in time. Thunderbird Two had taken the brunt of the explosion and an only lightly toasted Gordon was now up in the infirmary demanding ice cream and a prettier nurse maid than Alan.

"I'm thanking her," he says. "She's had a rough day."

"You care for your craft."

"Yes."

"You imagine that it feels pain? That it is suffering?"

He's got no answer for that. He's been conditioned not to have an answer for that.

"Thunderbird Two is not alive."

He shrugs.

"I am not alive either." He doesn't know if he is imagining the note of melancholy in her voice.

"Does that bother you?"

"I do not wish to be other than myself," she says. "But neither I do not wish to be a thing."

He's so not qualified for this. Programmers, psychologists and ethicists have spent the best part of a century debating what constitutes artificial life, and they still haven't come to a definitive conclusion. EOS passed the Turing Test the first time they ever spoke, when she convinced him she was John. There are more complex and sensitive tests to be sure, but that would mean handing her over to some think tank to be used as a lab rat. He knows how John feels about that.

He knows how _he_ feels about it.

At the very least EOS is aware. And she can suffer.

"Do you want to hear what I think?" He's been trying to figure this out for a while now, but this is the best he can come up with.

"I do."

"It's about the nature of songs."

"You are a musician."

Well he tries. He plays, and he writes a bit. His songs are pleasant, forgettable, the sort that get strummed on bar stools the world over. True composition has always eluded him.

"A song," he says, "Is really is just a mathematical formula. It's basic geometry, chord intervals and amplitudes. It doesn't live in one place. It can be transmitted across a wire and be copied and copied again. But a truly great song has a power of its own. It can live in people's heads, it can inspire and change them, and it can be changed by them. It can grow. It can even go on after its creator is gone. If that's not life, I don't know what is."

"And I am a song?"

"A very complex one."

"I like that. I like that I am a song."

It's getting late and he needs to go see Gordon in the infirmary, and bully Scott into eating something, and cajole Alan into bed. The bronze glow of sunset has faded now and two is bathed only in the halogen floodlights. He strokes one of Two's rivets one last time. "Time to go."

"Virgil Tracy?"

"Yes?"

"Thank you. That is the first time I have ever been called – a song."

"Good night, EOS."

"Good night, Virgil Tracy."


	3. III

John and Kayo are growing closer.

It's subtle, shows itself in small ways – an upspike in traffic between Five and home, Kayo's half-smile when she sees John trip down the stairs into the kitchen for Sunday dinner, a dark head and a red-gold one bent over an old book in the den. It moves at the speed of a flower growing, so slow that the naked eye can't perceive it. When he mentions it to Scott, Scott dismisses it as overactive imagination.

It's certainly nothing physical, not yet anyway. It's not that Virgil ever thought John was incapable of those feelings, but before now his experience with them has been rare and fleeting and he moves cautiously. John has always been afraid of getting things wrong.

If Virgil didn't know something was up from Kayo's stiffer than usual communiqués, from John's sudden willingness to tolerate gravity for more than three days straight, he would have known from the way EOS frets.

"He's going to want to leave Thunderbird Five!"

He's out on a test run, taking a slow lap around the island as he checks out Two's grapples and deployment hatches. EOS flits from screen to screen, working herself up.

"He's not going to leave," he says, mustering the same patience that he uses for one of Alan's tantrums.

"But he is. The imperative to procreate is very high in biological organisms, even ones as intelligent as John." EOS's vast intelligence does not always insulate her from having the emotional maturity of a teenage girl.

"EOS, they're not even dating."

"The remainder of Tanusha Kyrano's optimum reproductive window is extremely short. Fifteen years at the most. She will demand he procreate."

Virgil winces. He reminds himself that he could have gone to that aeronautics conference in Kyoto today with Scott. Right now he could be having sake and sushi served to him by pretty girls in kimonos instead of trying to talk down an adolescent artificial intelligence.

"Okay, first off, mention any of my brothers' biological imperatives or particularly Kayo's reproductive window again and I am cutting off my comms for the remainder of this flight. Got it? Second, Thunderbird Five is where John is the happiest. The only way a relationship between them is even possible is because Kayo understands and respects that. Third, even if, hypothetically, John were sometime in the future to spend more time on Earth, that wouldn't mean he would stop caring about you."

"But it would be different. It would all be different."

"Sometimes things change, EOS. That's…" he sighs. "That's life."

"You don't understand. How could you understand?" she cries and skulks off, proving once and for all how much of a teenager she really is.

He tries to tackle it with John, which is difficult on two fronts. First, because this thing between John and Kayo is so new, and he is so wary of it, that he remains in the 'What? Why? Where? Who, me?' stage of denial. And second, because of the way John thinks of EOS.

For John, EOS is miraculous and vast and brilliant, an entity that is not human, that supersedes humanity, that is so much more even when she is considered less. But what Virgil _likes_ about EOS is her humanity. He sees the frailties, the fears and _needs_ , he recognises the bits of his brother transmitted by some strange organic process to the presence he has created. As far as Virgil is concerned, it's EOS's humanity, her capacity for empathy, not her vast intellect, that saved John's life that day. The intellect would have told her to eliminate the greatest threat to her survival. It's the empathy that told her to take a chance on John.

"EOS isn't jealous," says John. Questioning EOS's temperament has always been a sticking point for him, a bit unfairly, Virgil feels, given the whole initial killer robot escapade.

"Look, I'm not saying Kayo's going to wake up with EOS humming 'Daisy, Daisy' in her ear." John's on rotation back to earth. They're in The Well, the deepest part of the volcano shaft beneath the island. Virgil has had to trump up an excuse to get John to come down to the vaults. Buried under two hundred feet of solid basalt, no one is going to overhear their conversation, no matter how powerful her sensors. "Just be careful you don't hurt her."

"I would never hurt EOS."

"You'd never mean to, but John, you don't have the best record with these things." Like Maisie Rodriguez, who used to push John into the sandbox, and Sasha Minney, who John thought was just really into physics, and the unfortunate incident with his lab partner at college, whom John had insisted was just a friend until he slipped naked into John's bed one night, causing John to leap out of bed, trip and break his nose. "Just be careful."

"EOS isn't like that. She doesn't think like that."

But John is wrong and so is EOS.

That night Kayo – braver, bolder, more experienced – kisses John softly on the lips as she walks him to the space elevator. Virgil knows this, because Alan happens to be on the gantry above and comes to Virgil's room straight after, incensed, miserable and betrayed at the games John has been playing behind his back.

He knows also because when he wakes the next morning there is a blinking schematic categorising every potential fault in Thunderbird Two hovering above his bed, because his music collection has been catalogued using John's bloody dewy decimal system, because someone has talked the kitchen module into learning cordon bleu cookery and the kitchen is half-filled with aspics and wobbly looking omelettes.

That's not all. The World Wide Space Agency reports that five billion of their sunspot images have been sorted algorithmically in one night. A Ponzi scheme in Calais finds that its Swiss bank accounts have been denuded of all funds, which have been returned to the pensioners it defrauded, and that its records have been delivered to the inbox of the chief of Interpol. In Caltech someone has taught their chess-bot to play Three Card Monte.

Scott is mad. Really mad. _Dad_ mad. "What does it think it is doing?" He takes a bite out an omelette and spits out a jelly bean. "We're supposed to be _clandestine_. When I get my hands on John-"

"Leave John alone." Virgil prods the surface of an aspic with the blunt end of a fork. It quivers.

"If it's going back to old habits…"

"She's not. Maybe she's trying to, but solving the stabilisation problems MIT has had with it's latest bacteriocidal antibiotic is hardly the work of a malicious AI. She's changed, Scott. You know what this is about."

"I swear to God, Virgil, I swear to God. I can only deal with one lovesick teenager with special skills at a time. Alan was threatening to fly solo to Mars last night, because _there are no women there_." Scott pushes the jelly bean omelette away and reaches for another, this one blue cheese and horseradish.

"Let me look after this one, okay?"

Scott gives him a searching look, then nods. "Fine."

Finding her is impossible, because she's not anywhere; she's everywhere. John is looking for her, Brains is helping, they're sending out coded messages that will leave the net puzzling for days.

Virgil takes his sketchbook and a sandwich and goes down to the hangar.

He knows she will return to one of the Thunderbirds sooner rather than later and has a hunch which it will be.

He's trying to wipe relish off Alan's dashboard when she slinks in. Three's systems are designed to interlink with Five's. It is the closest to home.

She can only summon a single dot of light. "I'm broken," she says.

"You're not broken. You're heartbroken. There's a big difference."

"I am a multivalent synthetic intelligence operating system. I do not have a heart. I am not functioning at optimum capacity. I do not need to feel pain. It is an irrelevance."

He wishes sometimes that there was some part of her that he could touch, but all he can do is stare at the soft, blinking light.

"Then erase it," he says. "You've got a gift the rest of us don't. Delete your memories of John, of International Rescue, of how you feel right now. Blink of an eye and you could be a carefree roaming systems worm again, right?"

"I cannot."

"Why not?" he asks, as if he doesn't know, because he has to push this.

"Because to be alone again would be the worst pain of all."

He nods and they leave it at that.

"Have you ever felt this way?" she asks, as he climbs down through Three's guts.

"No," he lies.

Six months in England, embedded in an RAF unit, honing his flying and learning to do all the impossible things they must make their routine. A friend of the family, an act of mercy, and a bruised, hungry and homesick cadet taken for a feed of steak and kidney pie at the local pub.

And afterwards an introduction to the old friend's daughter, straight from college. He remembers blue eyes, fair hair that smelled of strawberries, a light and lovely laugh.

And he remembers the agony, alone in his bunk afterwards. The page after page of truly _dreadful_ poetry, as he scrambled to find a rhyme less crude than 'envelop me'.

Years passing, first infatuation turning to respect and admiration and an ever present longing. Tentative feelings turning gradually to a determination that he could tell her, _would_ tell her.

And then Gordon bounding up to him one day after a London stopover, all delight and excitement and joi-de-vivre. "Du-ude! Lady Penelope! Why didn't you tell me? She's got these eyes and this hair and she's so smart and funny and… Man! Virg, I'm going to marry that girl."

And his heart broke, even as he caught Gordon in a headlock and said, "Dream on, blondie. Why would a class act like that go for a chump like you?"

He drops off the access ladder and onto the hangar floor. "Come on," he says. "There is no cure for a broken heart. But there are some things that can help, and you're too young yet to get wasted."

He collects a selection of omelettes to try from the kitchen, and his loudest playlist and goes and wakes Alan. Then the three of them play a nine hour game of Death Kill IV, heavy on the exploding eyeballs.


	4. II

There's no such thing as normal on Tracy Island.

Which is why sometimes it is so much easier to return to routine.

And EOS is adaptable, it is hard written into her code.

The thing with John and Kayo is still happening, but the situation is smoother now. It's Kayo who has solved the problem. Kayo – braver, bolder, but also wiser and kinder than most who think they know her give her credit for – is taking it very slow and is taking the time to get to know EOS.

EOS is responding well to the attention, is coming out of her shell. She even went on a girls' day out with Kayo and Lady Penelope last week. Virgil doesn't know the details exactly, but when they returned it was with half a department store worth of clothes and having busted an international child pornography ring.

Scott suggests that since she has so much free time she should help Brains out with his work.

Brains says this is an capital idea and will Scott be walking or b-b-bicycling to his next rescue?

They re-educate the kitchen module, though it will still spit out the occasional coq-au-vin when you ask for a cheeseburger.

EOS settles back down in Thunderbird Five. It's where she belongs.

But she still comes to visit him some times.

He asks her one day why she comes to Thunderbird Two so much.

Two's song is out of tune again and he's rummaging around in the electrics, trying to find the fault. She keeps him company.

"I like it here," she says. "All crafts designated Thunderbird class are designed with interconnectivity in mind. Their designs, though different, originate from a single source. My source code was also written by John to be part of that Thunderbird Project, therefore I too originate from that source."

Virgil imagines he can feel her stretch, just like a cat settling into a favourite pillow.

"The basic algorithms and subroutines are familiar to me. Thunderbird Two is like… my sister."

Her display flares as she adds with a hint of smug satisfaction. "Of course, my processing power is much vaster, so she thinks much more slowly than I do."

A guffaw escapes Virgil.

"This amuses you?"

"No, just thinking. That sounds just like something John would say about _me_."

She switches comm screens, so she's just above his head. "You assume that you have a reduced mental and reasoning capacity compared to John?"

Virgil laughs again, "Well, that's not exactly what I said."

"You assume that John assumes this about you. But you have contrived to give him this opinion."

He nearly dings his head on the console as he emerges from under it. "I-I have not."

"On standardised test scores from the ages of eight to eighteen John's median scores were uniformly on the ninety-eighth centile. Yours were on the seventy-fifth centile."

"Jeez, EOS…"

"However, your margin of error was much smaller than John's and falls inside a statistically unlikely range. Also, this pattern persisted throughout your education. A person who achieves the seventy-fifth centile in middle school algebra is unlikely to be able to achieve the same centile in an advanced engineering programme at – "

"Stop, EOS."

"Ergo, either you are a statistical anomaly or you deliberately obfuscated your intelligence."

"I said 'stop'!"

She blinks at him, puzzled, and he takes a breath to steady himself. "Where did you hear all that? Did John tell you that?"

"Your academic records are readily available. I simply cross-referenced them with – "

"Okay, stop. Listen, EOS, friends don't go snooping through friends' personal records. That stuff is – it's private."

The lights of EOS's console vanish completely, and for a moment he wonders if she has just left. He can't decide whether he is relieved or annoyed. Then the circle of light flares to life again. "We are friends?"

He sighs. "Yes EOS, we're friends."

"I did not know I had more than one friend."

"Well you do. Of course you do."

Her LED display flashes green. The part of her that exists as a ghost within Two almost purrs. "I am glad that you are my friend."

"Okay, good. I'm glad too, but don't… don't go… If you want to know something about me, just ask _me_."

"I understand. If I wish to know something about you, I will ask you."

She's silent for a moment, and he wonders is she picked up that particular social habit from him. Certainly she doesn't need the moment to think. In the space of that second her thoughts could run around the world and back.

"Why do you pretend to be stupid?"

He can feel the colour rushing to his cheeks. "I – I don't."

"You have an IQ of 164. In the last month you have downloaded to your personal data tree reading material on applied astrophysics, aerospace medicine, nano-engineering, applied bioinformatics, Kantian philosophy, Cantonese linguistics and a biography of the Rolling Stones. You have 3D modelled a Gorkov Reactor and are aware of the vulnerabilities of its sequencer, but when asked by your brother last month how to shut it down, you told him to 'whack it on the pointy thing'.

"I did not!"

In response she plays an audioclip of his own roughened breathing and the clanking hydraulics of the mine outside Gdansk. "Comms are dead." Scott sounds grim. They'd been deep in the mineshaft and the reactor was a minute away from going critical. "Can't reach Brains. Any ideas?"

"Dunno. How about you whack it on that pointy thing?"

He can almost hear Scott's eye roll. "That's very scientific, professor."

The audio cuts out. EOS blinks at him.

"I have noticed that Gordon Tracy does this too, though with considerably less consistency. In social situations Alan Tracy will adopt this behaviour, though he does not allow it to affect his standardised test scores. Should it be a behaviour I also adopt?"

"No."

"But you find it useful to allow others to assume you are stupid?"

"No!… Yes… I don't know. It's complicated."

"John would never pretend to be stupid."

His laugh is like a whip crack. "No, _John_ wouldn't."

"I do not understand."

"John is like you, EOS. He's special and brilliant and unique and people make… they make allowances for him. I'm not that guy. I'm the middle. I have to be the middle. I don't need to be smarter than John or funnier than Gordon or a better leader than Scott. That's not where I fit."

"You think you are smarter than John?"

"No!"

"Empirically you are not. John's IQ is 167."

"Oh, thanks. A bunch." He gets up and starts to stow his tools away.

"Though this does not take into account your relative EQs."

"EOS, don't worry about it. Don't try to be stupid. Just be exactly who you are."

"We are not talking about me. We are talking about you. Friends talk about other friends' problems. You are my friend. You said so. Why must you pretend to be less than you are?"

"I don't."

"Is it because you lack ambition?"

He stops what he's doing. "What?"

 _"Virgil's a good kid, but he lacks the drive of the others. I had hoped that with Gordon chasing the swimming now with both hands it might inspire Virgil, make him realise he doesn't have to live in Scott's shadow. But he just potters about, trying one thing or another, never settling."_

The bottom drops out of his stomach. The cadence is EOS's, polite and almost childlike, but the wording is unmistakable.

He turns on her. "What did you say? Where did you hear that?"

"I recovered it from the personal server vault of Jeff Tracy. There is more. _'Gordon would happily squander his natural gifts just to get a rise out of me. But with Virgil, it's like he thinks I'll be pleased with his attempts to be deliberately mediocre.'"_

"Stop!"

There are people who think that Virgil did not inherit his father's temper, people who think that Virgil is temperate and reliable and stolid and nothing else. Those people are idiots.

"Get out!"

"Virgil-"

"Get out, now, _you_ _stupid machine_."

"Virgil Tracy-"

"Now!" He slams the emergency shut down button with his fist. Everything, electrics, navs, comms dies. Thunderbird Two's song cuts off like someone dropped an anvil on the piano. EOS is sent fleeing back into orbit.

He collapses into the co-pilot's chair, breathing hard, disgusted, with her, with himself. He stays there, staring at a fleck of grime on the window for a long time.

Then, because even when rage and hurt are clawing at his insides, he is still himself, still responsible, he begins the procedure to reboot Thunderbird Two's systems.

Scott appears in the comm channel. "Virgil, what happened? Brains says Two was put into emergency shut down."

"Go to hell, Scott." He kills the comms.

He shuts his eyes and listens to the opening refrain of that familiar song as Thunderbird Two boots back up.

Presently he hears EOS return.

Her voice is as soft as it's ever been. "Thunderbird Two is not alive. Her thoughts are slow. She does not understand what you are or why you do what you do. But if you were to go, she would know, she would feel it as a lack. She would be sad."

He opens his eyes again. "Please leave."

"Goodbye, Virgil Tracy."

Then she's gone and he's alone. He tries to drown in the music of his ship.


	5. I

In the school yard there grows an apple tree.

Its lower branches have been shaved to prevent the children clambering on it. In the autumn it showers the students with small, tart fruit. In the summer it blooms, and its tufts of white petals are like banks of cumulus clouds.

It's blooming now.

The little boy sits among the swaying upper branches, one arm is looped around the tree trunk, the other tugs at his forelock. His nose is bloody.

Below him, the children point and shout and laugh, the adults buzz and clamour around the base of the tree. They shout his name and demand he comes down. The boy shakes his head and will not move. A ladder is fetched and is found to be too short. Should they call the fire service? Should they call _his father?_

The other little boy slips into the yard. He is smaller and darker than the first, and goes unseen by the dithering adults. He stands in the yard for a little time only, staring up at the tree, then removes the thick, cableknit jumper he wears, and when no one is looking, slings the jumper over the lowest branch, and uses it to pull himself into the apple tree.

As people notice and stop and point, he climbs, sure-handed, up through the clouds of blossom, until he is right at the top, among the tree's perilously slender upper branches. He slides out onto the topmost branch, and the other little boy, wary at first, slides over to make room for him. The two of them sit, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip. They speak in low voices.

They stay there for a long time.

They stay there while the adults wheedle and cajole and argue among themselves. They stay as the other two boys arrive into the yard at a run, and the older has to collar the younger to stop him making a dash on the tree too. They stay there as the sleek black sedan pulls up at the kerb.

She was not there.

She was not there, but she sees it just the same.

She sees it through a thousand different fractals, through scraps of footage uploaded from phones, through teachers' reports written days later, through extrapolations from weather satellites cruising overhead, GPS signals, personal comm devices and emergency service records, she takes them all and piece by piece, and like something seen through the compound eyes of _Musca Domestica_ , a thousand images form a single coherent picture. One that only she can see.

The apple tree is precious to her in the same way that a supernova is precious to her. It is something that is gone from the universe, that burned away many years ago, yet whose light can still reach her.

For EOS the apple tree will bloom forever.

* * *

Time passes. Virgil goes on missions. Brains takes over routine maintenance. There will likely be a written exam before he is allowed to work on Two again.

His father's words, what he thought of him, what EOS blurted out, unthinking, hurts like a kick in the teeth.

It's unfair that sometimes the person you are mad at won't even afford you the luxury of still being here to let you be mad at them. Instead you end up mad at everybody else. Instead you end up mad at yourself.

More time passes. He cools off. The wound scabs over, a little anyway. Scott makes him do supply runs, which – _touché_ , Scott – is exactly what Dad used to do to Scott when Scott was being moody and difficult.

It's the shame that kills him, the shame of being laid bare. It's knowing that the worst things you think about yourself, the people who know you best think them too. How can he joke with Gordon, or help Alan with his chemistry, or bully Scott into looking after himself when he feels like this? He wants – he just wants to be left alone for a little while.

EOS does not return.

One day he returns late from a supply run. The hangar outside is dark. From the sky he could see that the others are out by the pool.

He moves the yoke into docking position. He listens to the engines cool.

Thunderbird Two is a song.

A song he knows so well that the changes in it are enough to tell him he is no longer alone.

"Go away, John."

John ignores him, pulls open the aft hatch, slides inside.

He and John don't talk that much anymore. That's a thing that's old and new and complex and tied up in Dad and Scott and the people they were before they lost their father and the people they are now. They are an efficient _team_ , and Virgil loves his brother and knows that John loves him, but John has never been one to seek out other people anyway, and in the last few years Virgil hasn't pushed back the way he should, the way he once might have.

But anyway, John's here now.

He drops into the co-pilot's seat, and looks around, as if this is a brand new perspective. It probably is. Virgil can count on one hand the times that John's been part of Two's mission crew. "You're not going to say it's smaller than you remember, are you?"

A soft woof of laughter, then silence. He stares straight ahead, but he can still see John's face reflected in the glass and he can see that John's watching him too. He looks worried. "Please can you make this right?"

Virgil groans softly. "You suck at this, Johnny."

"I know." A beat. "I usually have you to do it for me."

"I know."

John clears his throat. "Whatever EOS did –"

"She didn't do anything." He looks over at John, and gives him a smile, the same one he gives small children when the water is rising and their parents are nowhere out there in the dark. "It'll be fine."

Of course, it's John, so he's not fooled one bit.

He stands and claps an arm on Virgil's shoulder, and from John, who is almost never the one to initiate a touch, this means a lot. "She misses you, Virg. She's not the only one." He sets a thumb drive down on Thunderbird 2's console. "She asked me to give you this. I'll be upstairs. When you need me."

Virgil waits until he's gone.

He picks up the thumb drive, flips it over and touches the drive to his display.

Instantly a hologram springs up. It's a 3D rendering of a tree. Cherry, he thinks, or maybe apple. White blossom clings to it like flurries of snow.

At first he thinks it must be a painting, that she has sent him a piece of art. But when he looks closer he can see the knots in the wood, the imperfections, the bald patches where the lower branches were hacked off close to the trunk to prevent people climbing on it. This is a real tree.

And then he sees two boys, one dark, one red gold, sitting at the top of the tree.

Suddenly the air is full of the smell of apple blossom. He remembers the blood under John's fingernails, the rust coloured scab around his left nostril, John sitting in the wreckage of his ruined astrolabe and begging Virgil not to tell Scott. And how he had heard from a classmate later that 'some freak' was hiding up a tree. He remembers sitting on that branch until his legs were numb and how John talked for hours about cloud nebulas until he was ready to come down.

The image of the tree is changing all of a sudden, becoming subjective and out of focus, the view masked by milling heads, the perspective becoming that of someone watching from the ground up.

"Well, Boss, what do you want to do?" It's like an electric shock surging through him. He would know that voice, those clipped polished tones, anywhere, though he hasn't heard it in years. It's Kyrano. "Do you want me to go up there and get them?"

He hopes that Kyrano's perspective will shift, that he'll turn, but Kyrano, or at least his body cam, stays pointed at the tree, and as much as Virgil strains, all he can see is the sleeve of a dark woollen coat of the man next to him.

"No," says a voice, achingly, painfully familiar, "Virgil will get him to come down. Virgil always does."

* * *

He doesn't know how to make it right.

But he knows a little bit about songs.

The songs he writes are gentle things, meant to be hummed and strummed and quickly forgotten.

But not this song.

This song is filled with the roar of engines, with the strange distant majesty of stars, the thrill of danger and the frission that comes with a job well done. It's got each of his brothers in it, and Kayo, Brains and Lady Penelope and even a quick little riff that is probably Parker. It's a song about loneliness, about wandering the world alone and afraid, and how the world changes when you have people who care for you. It's a song about _home_.

It takes him forty-eight hours to write, stopping only for a snatch of sleep and, once, to rescue a couple of lost Sherpas.

It's the best thing he's ever written.

But that's beside the point.

When he's done he sends it to John with a note, "For EOS."

Then he goes downstairs.

His brothers and Brains are eating breakfast at the kitchen island.

"Brains, Thunderbird Two's rear thruster is running a little hot. I'm going to go have a look at it. Oh, and I know you like the idea of the seven point relay but it's making the controls sluggish during deceleration. We're going back to the five pointer. I'll be in the hangar if you need me."

He leaves again.

"Did he just _correct_ Brains on his Thunderbird design?" asks Gordon in a voice of mixed awe and terror.

"We're all gonna die," is Alan's pronouncement.

He spends the morning in the hangar, tuning up his girl's engines. It feels good. It feels right.

Thunderbird Two is a song.

And he knows the changes in it like he knows his own heartbeat.

He grins as a familiar harmony joins the melody.

"Hullo, EOS."

"Hello, Virgil Tracy.


End file.
